Blog

The birth of an e-sport

E-sports are big business nowadays. Millions of gamers all over the world compete for million dollar prizes in games such as Counter-Strike, Overwatch and League of Legends. Everyone wants to become the new star, someone who makes a living from playing games. Similarly, every game developer dreams of creating an e-sports game. The truth is: e-sports are not created by game developers, but by the players! It’s the passion and commitment from a game community that defines if a game is worthy to be called an e-sports game.

When we started development on Liftoff, we always aimed at simulating the real-life drone racing sport and never imagined the game becoming a sport on its own. E-sports are for the big guys, the multimillion dollar game productions by big companies with years of experience, not a small indie developer like LuGus. Right?

Let the games begin!

Slowly but surely the last couple of months, e-sports became a a topic that was talked about at the studio. It all started with Gamescom, where we met some of the biggest names and organisations within the e-sports world. While Liftoff does not yet have the quality, support and reach of an e-sport, it does have a lot of qualities an e-sport needs: a focus on competition, a community-focused approach, multiplayer and skill-based gameplay. Promoting Liftoff as an e-sports in the future could make a lot of sense. We are interested and so is the community!

E-sports are created by a community and over the last couple of months we’ve seen some exciting community initiatives. HobbyLabs organised the Digital Drone Challenge, the very first community-run tournament, quickly followed by the Liftoff Racing Community (LRC) organising their first Race Meetup. The Liftoff team was also, invited to the Geneva Game Convention to organise a first real-life tournament, and there’s so much more to come!

Work It Harder, Make It Better, Do It Faster, Makes Us stronger

At LuGus Studios we are dedicated to providing everything the community needs to turn Liftoff into an e-sports title. Over the next couple of months, we’ll be releasing many multiplayer, tournament and community related features to the game to support these opportunities. We’ll be working closely with the community to learn what’s needed and how to best support these initiatives. We also plan on organising our own tournaments, based on strong partnerships, while continuing to improve every aspect of the game. We have some huge announcements to make soon!

The promise

The team at LuGus Studios has never been more excited about what’s to come. Liftoff is going places we never imagined or dreamed of. While the community keeps on growing and the project keeps on expanding every day, we feel this is just the start of much bigger things to come.

2017 will be a big year for the project. We aim for Liftoff to be more than just a “game” and for every second spent flying in our digital environments to be worthwhile and rewarding. For those inspired to make a name in the drone racing world, racing in Liftoff will be as much a career choice as flying a real drone. That’s our promise!